What It’s Like to Be a ‘Hijab Triathlete’ in a Sport Dominated by Skin

St. Louis triathlete Jeri Villarreal likes to arrive early to races. Usually, she spends the time checking her tires or chatting with other participants. Before the Chicago Triathlon this past August, she essentially became an amateur body-marker, helping other athletes who were struggling to peel the plastic backing off their race tattoos.

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“There was a little line forming in front of me where I was putting on the numbers,” Villarreal, 42, told Runner’s World after the race. “They were like, ‘She knows how to do it!’”

Her three children have given her plenty of experience with temporary body art. However, the role came with some irony. Because she’s Muslim and races in hijab—covered with a headscarf, with only her hands and face visible—Villarreal didn’t have a place to affix her own number.

Indeed, on a sweltering, 90-degree day—one that caused race organizers to cut some Olympic-distance competitors’ 10K run course to a 5K—Villarreal stood out for all the skin she wasn’t showing.

Under her one-piece race kit, she wore a long-sleeve shirt with a hijab attached from one of her favorite clothing brands, Nashata. Black arm and leg sleeves, made with fabric that cools when she sweats, stretched the rest of the distance between her ankles and wrists.

Was she hot? Of course—but so was everyone else. At this point, she has a few default answers to this frequently asked question. “Sometimes I say no because it’s funny,” she said, or she’ll thank the person for their concern. “Other times I just go, ‘yes,’ and we’re just looking at each other. And I’m like ‘Okay, now we can move on with the rest of our day.’”

The Decision to Cover Up Is an Individual One

Villarreal has covered off and on since converting to Islam from her family’s Lutheran faith at age 17. The religious transformation came as a result of a deep curiosity, a feeling that something was missing. In the verses of the Quran, she found the answers to her questions—and the freedom to keep questioning, a key component of her belief system.

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Decisions about covering differ from woman to woman. Wajiha Nashaud, a member of Villarreal’s triathlon club who is also Muslim, doesn’t cover, but chooses to dress modestly. For training and racing, Nashaud wears long shorts or capris and tops with sleeves, things she wouldn’t wear in non-athletic situations.

“It’s all about interpretation...from our understanding, it’s not an obligation,” Nashaud said. “Dressing one way doesn’t make someone better or less than another person. I think it’s your actions.”

Watch: Three runners talking about running with a hijab and what it means to them.

Villarreal agrees. Her choice to cover, she said, allows her express herself and her faith “not in physical ways.” She feels more confident, sure of who she is and what she believes, and isn’t afraid to talk about it. “I’m able to portray my true self without the baggage of trying to look a certain way. To me, it feels really freeing.”

She knows not everyone understands—some view the hijab as a symbol of oppression.

Sometimes they let her know on social media, where she goes by the handle modestlytri.ing. Most athletes and spectators are kind in person, but once—right as Villarreal was getting in the water—a woman she’d seen frequently at competitions told her she “felt sorry for her.”

The comment lodged in her mind. Villarreal did not have a particularly good race. “I don’t want pity or anything like that, because it is a choice,” she said. “Sometimes wearing the hijab comes with challenges, but mainly they’re internal battles. They’re nothing that stops me from swimming, biking, running, or doing anything to be fulfilled.”

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Beginning the Triathlon Challenge

Villarreal’s participation in triathlon wasn’t initially about making a statement. In the warmer months, she’s outside a lot—in addition to her full-time job in IT, she tends to an urban farm, a one-acre plot with chickens, beehives, fruit trees, and greenhouses full of heirloom vegetables. But during a stretch of cold days in 2014, stuck mostly indoors, she had trouble bringing herself out of a low mood.

Her sister had started doing 5Ks to lose weight, and invited Villarreal to join her, thinking the sunshine would do her good.

“I wasn’t really into running, but I really wasn’t into sports in general, so I didn’t think I was going to be any good at it,” Villarreal said. “I started running around the block, then running a little bit further and further and then next thing you know, I'm doing a 5K. I’m just like ‘That was easy!’”

She kept going, working her way up to the half marathon. Then, a family friend who was turning 60 proposed they tackle a triathlon. Villarreal joined the Saint Louis Triathlon Club and completed her first sprint-distance tri in 2016. Now, she’s completed two Ironman 70.3 races and traveled as far away as Monterrey, Mexico, and Cartagena, Colombia to compete.

“I love being challenged and pushing myself,” she said. “I can look back and see how much I've really progressed as a swimmer, a cyclist. I can’t believe how well I'm doing compared to where I was three years ago.”

Courtesy of Athlinks

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Fellow St. Louis Triathlon Club member Peter Gonzalez remembers meeting Villarreal on a group ride in 2016, where he was serving as a mentor. Of course he noticed the hijab, and wondered how she’d fare in the steamy St. Louis summer.

But that wasn’t the only reason she made an impression. When the group pedaled up a hill, Villarreal bent the rear derailleur, the mechanism that moves the chain between cogs when cyclists switch gears. “I knew she had strong legs when she did that; that’s not easy to do,” he said.

Balancing Training With Her Faith

Melding her sport with her faith does necessitate some adjustments, Villarreal said. Most races allow wetsuits only when the water is below a certain temperature. If it’s too warm, she requests an exemption to cover the stretches of skin from elbow to wrist, knee to ankle. When it’s cooler, she wears a two-piece wetsuit under her other gear, and steers clear of the volunteer wetsuit-strippers there to help athletes change during the transition.

Training during Ramadan, a holy month in which Muslims spend up to 17 hours without food or water, requires some planning. Villarreal strategically slots her workouts before and after sunset and sunrise, to align with breaks in fasting. She moves most of her workouts indoors so she sweats less.

It’s not impossible—she’s even completed sprint-distance triathlons during Ramadan—and ultimately even enhances the experience. “It felt like another act of worship,” she said. “I really do really believe we have to take care of ourselves and our bodies...so it just it felt like I was doing that, appreciating the fact that I have these abilities.”

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In reality, the attention to detail involved wasn’t much different from what she does every month as a working parent who also prioritizes training. Villarreal sticks to an hour-by-hour schedule she’s painstakingly planned in advance. Two days a week begin with an early-morning bike ride or 5 a.m. spin class. Most afternoons, she squeezes runs, yoga, or weightlifting into her lunch break.

That diligence is what impresses Nashaud about her friend and training partner. “She’s focused and constantly pushing herself and she has so many different ways of cross-training,” Nashaud said. “It’s just amazing what she can do. She’s definitely very busy.”

Villarreal’s children have noticed her newfound strength and confidence. Two of them—8-year-old Lola and 10-year-old Braulio—have begun competing themselves, finishing the Kids Tri in Chicago the day before Villarreal raced. Lola now tells her mom she wants to be just like her, and has asked to pull out the calendar to plan more destination races.

As she heads into her next season with big races on her calendar—beginning with Ironman 70.3 Puerto Rico in March and extending through Ironman 140.6 Arizona in November, her first at that distance—Villarreal is focused on improving her times and her swim techniques. Sometimes, she panics when it’s crowded; she’s working on how to break through the bottleneck.

More broadly, she hopes to serve as an example of what the future of triathlon could look like. In all her races, she’s only ever seen one other participant in hijab—and that was one of her friends from social media with whom she’d coordinated in advance (“there’s very few of us and we just connect,” she said of covered endurance-sports athletes on Facebook and Instagram).

And in addition to her faith, she doesn’t yet spot that many other athletes of color at starting lines. According to USA Triathlon, more than 88 percent of those who swim, bike, and run are white and only 0.5 percent are African American.

Villarreal hopes, eventually, that will all change, and that she can play a small role. “I feel like just being out there makes it seem possible,” she said. Her social-media messages bear this out—athletes who say they felt flustered by the idea of swimming in hijab or intimidated by the lack of diversity tell her they’ve been encouraged to give the sport another shot. “I know there are some people who see me and are like ‘Okay, well, maybe I can do it, too.”

Cindy KuzmaContributing WriterCindy is a freelance health and fitness writer, author, and podcaster who’s contributed regularly to Runner’s World since 2013.

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